The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Another reason for the abandonment of the far north might have been the realization that an equally productive walrus ground existed on the west coast of Baffin Bay.

  Walrus were, in fact, so abundant at the Cumberland Peninsula, the part of Baffin Island closest to Greenland, that, near the end of the nineteenth century, a Scots whaling station there was still killing more than four thousand tuskers annually as a by-product of its whaling activities. Even as late as the 1920s, Canadian officials could report that the “largest terrestrial walrus haul-out in the eastern Arctic” was in this district.

  And, in addition to being rich in walrus, the Baffin coast was a thousand miles closer to Tilli and to market than were the high Arctic hunting grounds.

  Map of the Canadian Arctic.

  Around 800 a shift from the high Arctic to the new lands and waters in the west seems to have begun. Before the end of the ninth century, enthusiastic valuta seekers had probably explored most of the vast region that would eventually become their western hunting grounds.

  As always, valuta men were primarily interested in tuskers. These were to be found in abundance along the Baffin coast from Cumberland Sound south to Hudson Strait, in that strait itself, and in its adjacent waters. Large tribes of walrus also lived in Foxe Basin and among the islands in the northern portion of Hudson Bay. All these regions would eventually be hunted, but the one that most engaged valuta seekers seems to have been northwestern Ungava Bay.

  Of the forty-five boat-roofed house foundations so far identified in the Canadian Arctic and subarctic, fifteen are on or adjacent to the western shores of Ungava Bay.

  The foundations are not, however, the only spectacular ruins in the Ungava region. Associated with them are some forty remarkable stone pillars.

  Stone cairns abound throughout the Arctic. The vast majority are the work of Eskimoan people and are called inukshuk, which is to say, semblances of men. Inukshuk are generally asymmetrical, under five feet tall, and built of a few large rocks balanced one on top of another. Primarily intended to mark travel routes across snow-covered landscapes, they serve a secondary purpose in imparting a sense of human presence to an otherwise desolate winter world.

  A second category of cairns includes those built by explorers, navigators, surveyors, and people afflicted with the Kilroy-was-here syndrome. These markers come in many shapes and sizes but are generally rather broadly conical piles of stones. They betray their comparatively recent origins by the sparseness of the lichen growth upon them.

  The cairns or, more properly, beacons with which we are here concerned come in two forms. One is a stela in the style of the neolithic menhir, or standing stone, found throughout northwestern Europe and especially numerous and conspicuous in Britain’s northern and western islands. Although stelae are generally rare in the Canadian Arctic, several stand in the western grounds.

  The second type is the tower beacon. This is a symmetrical, usually cylindrical (though sometimes slightly conical), structure whose outer courses are made of stones so carefully selected, laid, and butted without the use of mortar, as to be a credit to a master mason of any time and place. In most cases, the inner core is of rubble stone. The beacons stand from seven to fourteen feet high (unless they have been truncated by van-dals) and range from four to six feet in diameter. Massive and almost indestructible except at human hands, they dominate their surroundings.

  Map of beacons and longhouse ruins. The beacons were apparently built to identify Alban settlements. The longhouse ruins are the remains of boat-roofed house foundations.

  Tower beacons of this type are also found on Britain’s Northern and Western Isles, Iceland, western Greenland, the eastern Canadian high Arctic, the Atlantic coast of Labrador, and Newfoundland. They may stand alone but are frequently found in pairs, or even trios. An unknown number have been destroyed by curio seekers hoping to find messages or objects contained within. I know of three such demolished since 1960. Apparently nothing of interest was found in these, but then, I am convinced that the tower beacons did not contain messages. They were the message, speaking authoritatively to and for the people who built them.

  One of the most spectacular groups of those still surviving stands on the crest of Ivik Island, a few miles south of Payne River. I have only seen the site from the air, but in 1968 Tom Lee visited it and wrote the following account. It begins as he and Zachareesi were approaching Payne Bay by canoe from the south.

  As we crossed Brochant Bay we decided to stop at Ivik Island....As we landed it was apparent that there were three stone constructions, closely grouped, about a mile inland. . . . On the long climb to the beacons, for such they are, the curving brow of the hill hid them from view. Breaking over onto the top we were confronted with a most impressive sight of the largest beacon thus far known in the Ungava Bay region, together with two smaller features. They were spaced only a few yards apart, but not in line.

  The largest of the beacons is about 13 feet high and is further remarkable for its shape, which is surely purposeful. As with other beacons observed at several points up the coast . . . it is circular and rises from the base as a cylinder . . . but at a height of 3 feet where the diameter is about 5 feet, it begins to expand achieving a diameter of about 6 feet at 6 feet up. It then tapers to about 4 feet rising again as a cylinder and is crowned with a single large stone.... Black lichens cover parts of the outer surface, but do not fill spaces between the stones.

  The next highest beacon in the group is about 8 feet high . . . about 3 feet in diameter tapering to 2 feet at the top.... The lowest beacon, only 4’8” high, may have been left unfinished. Although about 10 large stones have tumbled from it . . . its diameter is about 4 ½ feet.2

  Over the years I myself encountered a number of these remarkable structures in the Canadian Arctic, on the Labrador coast—and 2,500 miles to the eastward, where Alistair Goodlad told me, “All over Shetland are these big beacons. Fishermen still use them as shore marks to keep track of where they’ve set their gear, but Lord knows when they were built, or by whom, or for what.”

  The Ivik pillars are but one constituent in a string of towers running right the way around the coast of Ungava Bay. Another string extends west from Payne Bay following the Payne and Kogaluk rivers through the interior of the Ungava peninsula to emerge on the coast of Hudson Bay. A southern chain extends down the Labrador and Newfoundland coasts. Tower beacons have also been found in Kane Basin, Jones Sound, and elsewhere in the high Arctic grounds once hunted by valuta men.

  We may never know all the purposes served by the stelae and tower beacons. Some may have been raised as navigational aids. Most apparently convey some such message as We are here or This is so-and-so’s place, or Look for us to the north/south/east/west of this/these pillars. One thing is certain. They were not erected simply to pass the time.

  Who built them? Modern Inuit deny that they or their ancestors had anything to do with these monumental structures. One can discern no purpose they might have served in Dorset, Thule, or Inuit cultures. In any case, they (and the boat-roofed house foundations) are almost never found in the western half of territories occupied by any of these peoples. They belong to the eastern Arctic and to North Atlantic shores.

  As their hoary lichen growths attest, the pillars are much too ancient to have been erected in historic times. I am confident they were built by the same people who constructed the boat-roofed house foundations, with which many of the tower beacons and stelae are closely associated.

  According to Jimmy Ford, a long-time Hudson’s Bay Company trader on Ungava Bay, the local Inuit believed the beacons were built by “white strangers who came to Ungava in boats a long, long time before we did.”

  Presumably valuta men first worked the western grounds from their homes in Tilli and, because the two places were so far apart, overwintered in the west. The distribution of boat-roofed foundations in the new grounds forms a pattern similar to one in the high Arctic, where ten foundations are concentrated withi
n fifty miles of Cape Herschel on Smith Sound (the remaining seven being widely dispersed to the south and west). In the western grounds we find fifteen foundations concentrated along the eighty-mile stretch of coast between Payne and Diana bays, the rest being scattered to the south and west, except for one on the nearby north shore of Hudson Strait.

  Both the high Arctic and the western grounds had their core areas within which most valuta seekers concentrated their efforts, leaving a few mavericks to establish themselves in more distant outposts. The heart of the high Arctic grounds was the southern part of Kane Basin, especially Buchanan Bay. The heart of the western grounds was Ungava Bay, and especially Diana Bay.

  The tallest of the group of three lichen-encrusted tower beacons on Ivik Island, near the mouth of the Payne River.

  The ninth century was a time of expansion and prosperity in the west. As it drew towards its close, people in Tilli, Crona, and the western grounds alike were living peaceable and productive lives... unaware that a nemesis was again beginning to menace them from the east.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WESTVIKING

  ALTHOUGH THE LAST DECADES OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY saw the Vikings well launched upon the devastation of Britain proper, Tilli was still a safe haven attracting a steady flow of refugees. These may have included Islanders from as far south as Islay, together with some few mainlanders from Scotland and even Ireland. All fugitives from the Sons of Death, whether Celts or Albans, would surely have been welcomed in Tilli.

  Some came west in their own wood-sheathed or skin-covered vessels. Others came as passengers in merchant ships trading between Tilli and the British Isles.

  The existence of this maritime commerce is confirmed even in Norse sources. In the prologue to Landnámabók, which was written early in the twelfth century, probably by Ari Thorgilsson, Iceland’s first historian, we are told:

  In that Book on the reckoning of time which the Venerable Bede drew up, mention is made of the Island called Tili, which in books is said to be six days’ sailing north from Britain. There, he said, day came not in winter, nor night in summer when day is at its longest.... But Bede the Priest died 735 years after the Incarnation of our Lord, according to what is written, and more than one hundred years before Iceland was peopled by the Northmen. But before Iceland was peopled from Norway there were in it the people the Northmen called Papar; they were Christian people and it is held they must have come over seas from the west . . . and it is stated in English books that in those times voyaging took place between the two countries [Britain and Iceland].

  Bede himself tells us in his De Temporum Ratione that he had his information about Tilli “from certain men of our own age who arrive from these countries” . . . information from which he understood that travellers had circumnavigated the island.

  Confirmation of sailings between Tilli and Britain is also found in De Mensura Orbis Terrae, a book written about 820 by a cleric named Dicuil.

  Thirty years ago some clerics who had sojourned on that island [Thule] from the Calends of February to the Calends of August, told me that not only in the summer solstice but in the days around it the setting sun does not hide itself... so that there is no darkness for even a little while, and a man can do whatever he wishes, even pick lice from his robe, just as if the sun was shining.... They are mistaken who have written that the sea surrounding Thule is frozen . . . since, sailing during the time when naturally it is coldest, they landed there and dwelt there . . . but they did find a frozen sea one day’s sail toward the north.

  Settlers arriving in Tilli in the ninth century would not have found things as easy as in the eighth for they would have had to deal with the same inclement weather, which presumably contributed to the Alban abandonment of the high Arctic grounds. During the first part of the century, they endured low temperatures and heavy precipitation. However, similar conditions then prevailed all across northwestern Europe so, though a crofter’s life in Tilli might have been difficult, the island continued to offer better prospects than European lands which were being overrun by Northmen.

  Although the Norse probably knew a certain amount about what was happening in Tilli, during most of the ninth century they were preoccupied with rich and easy pickings from plundering the British Isles and the Continent.

  By 807 they held a bridgehead in western Ireland and by 836 had turned Dublin into a major slave-trading base. During the early decades of the ninth century they seized most of Caithness, together with much of Scotland’s west coast to and beyond the Isle of Man. In 839 they slaughtered the pick of Alba’s mainland forces in a battle which so weakened the ancient kingdom that within thirty years it fell to the Dalriad Scotti. By mid-century the only opposition the Norse faced in northern Britain was from guerrilla bands, and from the Danes, who were now intruding on Norse turf with spectacularly bloody consequences to both parties, as well as to the unfortunate indigenes.

  Big armies and big fleets became the order of the day as the Scandinavians descended on mainland Britain and the western coasts of Europe. The days when any entrepreneur could go a-Viking on his own account were ending. Danish and Norwegian sea-kings who now dominated the business evidenced a fatal antipathy towards independent operators. Furthermore, most outlying British settlements had already been pillaged, and the land occupied by Norse settlers who took a dim view of themselves being raided, even if by their own compatriots. By mid-century such outlaws’ outlaws were being driven to the periphery of the Norse-dominated world, forced to lair in forbidding and inhospitable retreats. The brooding cluster of stone pinnacles constituting the Faeroe Islands undoubtedly became just such a robbers’ roost.

  Up to this time there is little contemporary documentation of what was happening, but from here onward much that illuminates the Norse story is to be found in accounts committed to parchment and preserved by Icelandic clerics, mostly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.1

  What follows is mainly derived from Landnámabók and Íslendingabók.

  NADDOD

  Some time around 850 a Viking’s Viking by the name of Naddod made his way to the Faeroes. Landnámabók describes him in succinct but forthright terms: “Concerning Naddod, brother in law of Olvir Barnarkarl. He was a notorious Viking. He settled in the Faeroe Islands because he was unwelcome elsewhere.”

  Olvir Barnarkarl was himself a notorious Viking, although apparently somewhat lacking in true berserker fervour since, as Landnámabók tells us, “he would not allow children to be tossed on spear points as was then a custom of the Vikings.”

  This pastime required a group of warriors armed with spears to form a circle around one of their number who would then toss a baby into the air. The object was to catch the infant on the tip of one’s spear and toss it across the circle to be impaled on the spear of another player. The infants were the offspring of captured women who, if they survived mass rape, could be sold into slavery unencumbered by babes at the breast.

  No such amusements were available on the Faeroes and, after a time, Naddod’s crew wearied of howling winds, swirling fogs, towering peaks, seabird stew, and the prickly company of their berserker comrades. There was nothing for it but to set out on a Viking voyage.

  The question before Naddod was: where could he ply his trade without too great a risk of getting a split skull or an arrow in the gut? He seems to have been the first Viking to have decided to have a go at Tilli.

  What did he expect to gain? Tilli boasted no richly furnished castles or merchants’ premises, though it must have possessed some churchly treasures. It did produce wealth in the form of Arctic valuta, but Vikings could seldom have hoped to lay hands directly upon such loot because, while Alban ships could not outfight Norse knorrin, they could usually outrun them.

  Tilli did, however, offer one major enticement. The island was home to many strong and healthy Vestmenn—Westmen—as the Norse called the natives of northern Britain, Ireland, and the Islands. And Westmen commanded premium prices in Continental slave market
s.

  Tilli would hardly have been an easy mark. As a result of their horrendous experiences with the Norse in Britain, the western island’s inhabitants must assuredly have been ready and willing to make things very hot for any Viking who might come their way. A Northman falling into their hands could have expected his own plot of land: six feet by two feet . . . if indeed his corpse was not left out in the sun and rain for sea eagles and ravens to consume.

  Nevertheless, one spring day Naddod sailed for Tilli with his band of twenty or thirty desperados—“Happy Warriors,” as Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness sardonically calls them.

  They probably made a straightforward passage west to the traditional landfall of Horn in southeastern Tilli. But thereafter, instead of setting a course along the southeastern coast of the island, Naddod sailed north along the east coast until he reached Reydarfjördur, as it is still called.

  Landnámabók reports that Naddod and his men then climbed “to the top of a high mountain from which they looked about, far and wide, searching for smoke or any indication of the land being inhabited, but could see nothing of the kind.”

  Naddod’s failure to find people at Reydarfjördur is taken by many historians as proof the island was then unoccupied. However, in view of Naddod’s subsequent behaviour, and of the Vikings who followed him, I conclude that, far from trying to find an inhabited place, Naddod was deliberately seeking an empty corner in a settled landscape.